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Insider View: The Tragedy of the U.S. Deep State

May 14, 2021

Pepe Escobar explains why Henry Kissinger must have lost the diplomatic plot.

Henry Kissinger, 97, Henry the K. for those he keeps close, is either a Delphic oracle-style strategic thinker or a certified war criminal for those kept not so close.

He now seems to have been taking time off his usual Divide and Rule stock in trade – advising the combo behind POTUS, a.k.a. Crash Test Dummy – to emit some realpolitik pearls of wisdom.

At a recent forum in Arizona, referring to the festering, larger than life Sino-American clash, Henry the K. said, “It’s the biggest problem for America; it’s the biggest problem for the world. Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.”

In realpolitik terms, this “kind of Cold War” is already on; across the Beltway, China is unanimously regarded as the premier U.S. national security threat.

Kissinger added U.S. policy toward China must be a mix of stressing U.S. “principles” to demand China’s respect and dialogue to find areas of cooperation: “I’m not saying that diplomacy will always lead to beneficial results…This is the complex task we have… Nobody has succeeded in doing it completely.”

Henry the K. actually must have lost the – diplomatic – plot. What Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are now involved in, full time, is to demonstrate – mostly to the Global South – how the American-enforced “rules-based international order” has absolutely nothing to do with international law and the respect of national sovereignty.

At first I had archived these Henry the K. platitudes out of sight. But then someone who used to hold a stellar position at the top of the U.S. Deep State showed he had been paying close attention.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doomsday ex Machina: Daniel Ellsberg and the Nuclear Gang

December 28, 2020

Doomsday ex Machina: Daniel Ellsberg and the Nuclear Gang

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world

– Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” (1963)

October 15, 1969.

That’s the day the world might have ended, had Madman Richard Nixon had his druthers.

In his recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg paints a doom and boom picture of the future, unless we immediately engage in negotiations with other nuclear armed nations to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and begin the dismantling of the Doomsday Machine that is programmed to destroy as much life as possible on the planet once global nuclear war begins — a perilously close possibility under the current postures and protocols of nuclear-armed governments. (Even as late as last week, NATO rejected a UN call for the elimination of these omnicidal weapons.)

In the above example, Richard Nixon was inspired by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strong arming tactics in securing an armistice in Korea. Citing Nixon Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Ellsberg writes,

Nixon “saw a parallel in the action President Eisenhower had taken to end another war. When Eisenhower arrived in the White House, the Korean War was stalemated. Eisenhower ended the impasse in a hurry. He secretly got word to the Chinese that he would drop nuclear bombs on North Korea unless a truce was signed immediately. In a few weeks, the Chinese called for a truce and the Korean War ended.”

Like Ike, Nixon knew that there was no point in bluffing; your future credibility was on the line. Diminished credibility, if you’re a super power, could be a dangerous thing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Kissinger Warns: China-US Must Agree To “Limits” On Making Threats Or Risk War

October 8, 2020

Kissinger Warns: China-US Must Agree To “Limits” On Making Threats Or Risk War

Two major and relatable statements have been issued Wednesday on the question of US ties with Taiwan and China’s growing anger and increasingly bellicose rhetoric in response.

First, the notoriously hawkish editor-in-chief of China’s state-owned news tabloid the Global Times issued a threat, saying China should “fully prepare itself for war” with Taiwan in the event it restores diplomatic relations with the United States.

Hu Xijin wrote in his latest opinion piece that “We must no longer hold any more illusions. The only way forward is for the mainland to fully prepare itself for war and to give Taiwan secessionist forces a decisive punishment at any time.”

*AFP/Getty Images: China’s President Xi Jinping & former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Nov.2019 New Economy Forum at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.*

The GT editor added that “As the secessionist forces’ arrogance continues to swell, the historical turning point is getting closer.” The secessionist forces he was specifically denouncing is the Taiwanese Kuomintang Party, or KMT, who he described as having “woken up on the wrong side of the bed. They have gone downhill and become vulgar.”

And the latest actions of its legislators is what he finds most alarming, according to his description:

The Kuomintang (KMT) group in Taiwan’s “Legislative Yuan” proposed two bills, asking the island’s authorities to request US assistance in resisting the Communist Party of China and to resume diplomatic ties with the US. The move is widely believed to checkmate the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and put the DPP in a difficult position.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Machiavellian US in the Middle East

May 21, 2020

A Machiavellian US in the Middle East

The war in Syria has dropped out of the news, like almost everything else, in a time when the Coronavirus seems to dominate all discourse and reporting. But the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to strangle its own country. The Russians continue to bomb on his behalf, terrifying civilians and hospitals. The Americans work semi-clandestinely to undermine both the regime and its Russian backers.

There is no sign in the US-Soviet relationship of what was called in the 1970s and 80s détente. The big powers, Russia, the US, the UK and France appear intent on maintaining their interests in the Middle East.

Russia has long been a friend of Syria and has had its single foreign base there since Soviet days. For even longer the US, France and the UK have been a friend of Saudi Arabia and today provide weapons for the Saudi air force so it can support Yemen’s government in its attack on the Houthi rebels, resulting in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Finding a pathway to big power détente in the Middle East seems to be eternally difficult. For those who want to shed some light on how it all works, I refer them to an excellent analysis in the current issue of Harvard University’s International Security by Professor Galen Jackson of Williams College.

Reading this one understands how US Middle East policy in the era of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and their national security advisor Henry Kissinger became totally Machiavellian after Nixon’s resignation.

It raises the question about how Machiavellian it is today. Is the US engaged in undermining Russia so that it can ensure its dominance in the Middle East? Has it been about trying to give Russia a bloody nose in Syria via the firepower of its local allies, which it and some of its NATO allies have provided?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could Central Bankers Use Coronavirus as the Scapegoat to Deflect Blame for the Next Imminent Global Economic Crisis?

February 24, 2020

Could Central Bankers Use Coronavirus as the Scapegoat to Deflect Blame for the Next Imminent Global Economic Crisis?

We all know that Henry Kissinger famously stated in an interview, shortly after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2009, that a crisis should be viewed as a “great opportunity” to implement massive changes that otherwise would not be accepted under normal societal conditions. Author Naomi Klein also discussed this subject in length, in her book The Shock Doctrine, of how those in power use, and even sometimes deliberately manufacture crises in order to create weakened and susceptible psychological states in citizens that allow them to implement changes in the global power structure within months that would otherwise take years to achieve (by the way, if you want to read The Shock Doctrine, a highly engaging and informative book, please patronize your local book store instead of buying it from Amazon). Keeping these known historical facts in mind, could Central Bankers use the coronavirus pandemic in an opportunistic, Machiavellian manner to scapegoat coronavirus as the source of blame for the next imminent global economic crisis that they manufactured?

In light of Event 201, this connection that may seem to be far-fetched at first glance suddenly becomes much more realistic. What was Event 201? Event 201 was a viral pandemic exercise hosted by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY that preceded the first known confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic later that year in December of 2019. In a fiction monologue delivered by an actor at that forum, the delivered monologue discussed a viral outbreak that killed 65 million people in the first six months after Patient Zero and then spread to nearly every nation in the world by month number six of the pandemic.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Trump Win changed US Politics forever

October 8, 2018

How Trump Win changed US Politics forever

Global Intel Hub (Zero Hedge Exclusive) 10/7/2018 — Now that MidTerms are coming up, the heat is being turned up on Trump in the deep state’s ‘death by a thousand cuts’ approach to assassinate his character and any of his allies as well. But in this flagrant and public information war against Trump, the deep-state has shown it’s hand, as it’s a public game, so it’s easy to explain here what’s going on. As we have explained in our book Splitting Bits, the world is not as it seems.

Since about 1950, the United States has developed an extremely sophisticated system of manipulating political systems:

The most infamous episodes include the ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — whose government was replaced by an authoritarian monarchy favorable to Washington — the removal and assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the violent toppling of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose government was swept aside in 1973 by a military coup led by the ruthless Gen. Augusto Pinochet. For decades, these actions were considered imperatives of the Cold War, part of a global struggle against the Soviet Union and its supposed leftist proxies. Its key participants included scheming diplomats like John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, who advocated aggressive, covert policies to stanch the supposedly expanding threat of communism. Sometimes that agenda also explicitly converged with the interests of U.S. business: In 1954, Washington unseated Guatemala’s left-wing president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had had the temerity to challenge the vast control of the United Fruit Co., a U.S. corporation, with agrarian laws that would be fairer to Guatemalan farmers. The CIA went on to install and back a series of right-wing dictatorships that brutalized the impoverished nation for almost half a century.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Administration Planning Pinochet-type Coup in Venezuela

February 6, 2018

Trump Administration Planning Pinochet-type Coup in Venezuela

The retrograde Donald Trump administration is planning a military coup in Venezuela to oust the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, speaking at the University of Texas prior to embarking on a multi-nation tour throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, said the military in Latin America has often intervened in Latin American politics during times of serious crises.

Tillerson’s remarks conjured up scenes from America’s dark past in Latin America. To make matters worse, Tillerson invoked the imperialistic Monroe Doctrine of 1823, stressing that it is as “relevant today as it was the day it was written.” The Monroe Doctrine, throughout American history, has been used by the United States to justify military interventions in Latin America, often with the aim of establishing “banana republics” subservient to Washington’s whims.

According to a BBC report, Tillerson prefaced his augmented his remarks by stating that he was “not advocating regime change and that he had no intelligence on any planned action.” Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger made similar remarks before the bloody September 11, 1973 Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup against Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende. While publicly rejecting any U.S. involvement in the destabilization of Chile’s democratically-elected government, Kissinger was working behind the scenes with Chile’s armed forces to overthrow and assassinate Allende. Eleven days after the Chilean coup, Kissinger was rewarded by Nixon by being named Secretary of State, along with keeping his National Security Adviser portfolio.

Ever since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power in 1999, the CIA has attempted at least one military coup — a putsch that was quickly reversed – in 2002, several “color revolution”-style street protests and disruptions, economic warfare, and CIA-initiated general strikes to force both Chavez and Maduro from power.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Henry Kissinger says a “pre-emptive attack” against North Korea is a “strong” possibility

February 2, 2018

Henry Kissinger says a “pre-emptive attack” against North Korea is a “strong” possibility

Kissinger, “Temptation to deal” with North Korea “with a pre-emptive attack is strong”

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has said that he agrees with the aggressive statements President Trump has made towards North Korea.

Kissinger also warned Congress last week against potential military intervention near Russian and Chinese borders without the world’s support.

The former Secretary of State said that the Trump Administration “will hit that fork in the road, and the temptation to deal with it with a pre-emptive attack” against North Korea “is strong, and the argument is rational.”

PJ Media reports…

The Trump administration has signaled that North Korea would be crossing a red line if it developed nuclear capability for its intercontinental ballistic missile program. Yet some policy officials and military experts claim that North Korea has already crossed that line, or is at least very close to attaching nuclear warheads to its missiles.

Kissinger offered his thoughts on the impending “fork in the road,” in which the administration may consider pre-emptive military action or increasingly tighter sanctions against the regime.

“We will hit that fork in the road, and the temptation to deal with it with a pre-emptive attack is strong, and the argument is rational, but I have seen no public statement by any leading official,” Nixon’s secretary of State told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “But in any event, my own thinking, I would be very concerned by any unilateral American war at the borders of China and Russia, in which we are not supported by a significant part of the world, or at least of the Asian world.”

The current North Korean trajectory, Kissinger continued, could lead to nuclear proliferation throughout Asia, as he believes South Korea will not accept being the only Korea without nuclear capability. Japan will follow suit, he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cracks in Dollar Are Getting Larger

September 29, 2017

Cracks in Dollar Are Getting Larger

Many Daily Reckoning readers are familiar with the original petrodollar deal the U.S made with Saudi Arabia.

It was set up by Henry Kissinger and Saudi princes in 1974 to prop up the U.S. dollar. At the time, confidence in the dollar was on shaky ground because President Nixon had ended gold convertibility of dollars in 1971.

Saudi Arabia was receiving dollars for their oil shipments, but they could no longer convert the dollars to gold at a guaranteed price directly with the U.S. Treasury. The Saudis were secretly dumping dollars and buying gold on the London market. This was putting pressure on the bullion banks receiving the dollar.

Confidence in the dollar began to crack. Henry Kissinger and Treasury Secretary William Simon worked out a plan. If the Saudis would price oil in dollars, U.S. banks would hold the dollar deposits for the Saudis.

These dollars would be “recycled” to developing economy borrowers, who in turn would buy manufactured goods from the U.S. and Europe. This would help the global economy and help the U.S. maintain price stability. The Saudis would get more customers and a stable dollar, and the U.S. would force the world to accept dollars because everyone would need the dollars to buy oil.

Behind this “deal” was a not so subtle threat to invade Saudi Arabia and take the oil by force. I personally discussed these invasion plans in the White House with Kissinger’s deputy, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, at the time. The petrodollar plan worked brilliantly and the invasion never happened.

Now, 43 years later, the wheels are coming off. The world is losing confidence in the dollar again. China just announced that any oil-exporter that accepts yuan for oil can convert the oil to gold on the Shanghai Gold Exchange and hedge the hard currency value of the gold on the Shanghai Futures Exchange.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fall Of America Signals The Rise Of The New World Order

December 2, 2015

The Fall Of America Signals The Rise Of The New World Order

“The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another.” — Henry Kissinger, “Henry Kissinger On The Assembly Of A New World Order”

“[P]art of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.” — Barack Obama

“We reiterate our strong commitment to the United Nations (UN) as the foremost multilateral forum entrusted with bringing about hope, peace, order and sustainable development to the world. The UN enjoys universal membership and is at the center of global governance and multilateralism.” — Fifth BRICS Summit Declaration

“We support the reform and improvement of the international monetary system, with a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty. We welcome the discussion about the role of the SDR in the existing international monetary system including the composition of SDR’s basket of currencies. We support the IMF to make its surveillance framework more integrated and even-handed.” — Fifth BRICS Summit Declaration

Here is where many political and economic analysts go terribly wrong in their examination of current global paradigms: They tend to blindly believe the mainstream narrative rather than taking into account conflicting actions and statements by political and financial leaders. Even in the liberty movement, composed of some of the most skeptical and media savvy people on planet Earth, the cancers of assumption and bias often take hold.

Some liberty proponents are more than happy to believe in particular mainstream dynamics. They are happy to believe, for example, that the growing “conflict” between the East and West is legitimate rather than engineered.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

They Sow the Cyclone – We Reap the Blowback

November 27, 2015

They Sow the Cyclone – We Reap the Blowback

How Uncle Sam Seeded Global Jihad and Cultivates It to This Day

“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” — Hosea 8:7

It may be surprising to hear, but it is a plain historical fact that modern international jihad originated as an instrument of US foreign policy. The “great menace of our era” was built up by the CIA to wage a proxy war against the Soviets.

A 1973 coup in Afghanistan installed a new secular government that, while not fully communist, was Soviet-leaning. That was a capital offense from the perspective of America’s Cold War national security state, at the time headed by Henry Kissinger.

Conveniently for Kissinger, the dirt poor country was sandwiched between two US client states: Pakistan to the east and Iran (then still ruled by the CIA-installed Shah) to the west. Immediately after the coup, the CIA and the clandestine security agencies of Pakistan (ISI) and Iran (SAVAK) began regime change operations in Afghanistan, orchestrating and sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist insurrections and coup attempts.

Due to these efforts, as well as the government’s own oppressiveness, a widespread rebellion broke out in Afghanistan in 1978. In July 1979, US President Jimmy Carter, on the advice of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, officially authorized aid to the puritanical Mujahideen rebels, to be delivered through the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone.” This was on top of the unofficial aid that the CIA had already been funneling to Afghan Islamist insurgents for years through Pakistan and Iran.

In a 1998 interview, Brzezinski openly admitted that he and Carter thus “knowingly increased the probability” that the Soviets would militarily intervene. And indeed Russia did invade in December 1979, beginning the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War. In the same 1998 interview, Brzezinski boasted:

“The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eventual Consequences

September 7, 2015

Eventual Consequences

Mark Bryan

The US empire has murdered some 40 million people since World War II (according to John Stockwell), has suppressed popular social change in dozens of countries, has overthrown and assassinated their leaders and has organized and trained right-wing death squads that murdered and tortured their citizens. Both Al Qaeda and ISIS are largely US inventions. Meanwhile, the US enjoyed nearly the highest per capita income in the world, peace, harmony, and consumerism for decades—until recently—while sowing chaos abroad. But there have been no negative consequences for the US—until its recent economic decline.

Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest war criminals of the 20th century, lives on into his 9th decade and is consulted regularly as a respected geopolitical expert by governments and the media alike. He seems to be in the media a lot these days. He even makes quite a bit of sense; it is uncanny how people stop lying once they retire. But in case you don’t know, while he still had a day-job, Kissinger orchestrated the four-year secret bombing of Cambodia which killed two million people and set the scene for the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime of Pol Pot. He got the Nobel Peace prize for agreeing to the Vietnam peace accord in 1973—which had first been offered in 1968. Barack Obama collected his Nobel Peace prize too—and went on to destroy Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, and perpetuate drone warfare in Pakistan and other places. Sometimes the Nobel Peace Prize seems like a license to kill.

Dick Cheney’s Halliburton company made billions while Cheney oversaw the torture program during the Bush administration. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other Iraq fabulists walk free, while the truth-tellers Manning, Assange and Snowden remain imprisoned, trapped at an embassy, or live in exile. Many other whistleblowers, such as Binney, Drake, and Kiriakou, have also been punished.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 6 – Solutions

April 24, 2015

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 6 – Solutions

All problems, all crises, have at least one solution, if not many solutions. There is no such thing as an unwinnable scenario. Some may not be smart enough or courageous enough to see it, but the solution is always there, waiting to be discovered. The only fight that cannot be won is the fight in which the enemy makes all the rules and we foolishly abide by those rules. Life is not a game of chess, and a man can choose to be more than a pawn anytime he has the guts to do so.

In the past, I have likened the liberty movement to a rebellion against not just tyrants but the game itself – a group of people willing to walk away from the chess board and make their own rules. I stand by that assertion. However, simply walking away is not enough; we must also be willing to take actions that will destroy the game entirely.

In order to accomplish this task, any rebellion against corruption of power must be self-critical – more self-critical of its own weaknesses than opposing propagandists could ever be. Most of our problems as a society are being caused by a relatively small number of elitists, but we will never be able to undo these problems without understanding our weaknesses as much as the enemy’s weaknesses. In this final installment of my six-part series, I will talk about REALsolutions to the inevitable economic implosion in front of us, but I will also discuss the shortcomings of the liberty movement as an obstacle to the success of those solutions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Video of the Day – John McCain Threatens Protesters with Arrest, Calls them “Low-Life Scum”

January 30, 2015

Video of the Day – John McCain Threatens Protesters with Arrest, Calls them “Low-Life Scum”

He’s a thug, and a crook, and a liar, and a pseudo-intellectual and a murderer. Ok? Those things are factually verifiable.

– From the late Christopher Hitchens’ outstanding interview: Christopher Hitchens’ Polemic Against Henry Kissinger

Crazy John McCain is at it again. Nothing gets this guy more riled up than American plebs questioning status quo war criminals. I suspect much of this anger is rooted in his own legitimate fear about how history will remember his own legacy of remarkable stupidity.

Truly remarkable to see a Senator become so easily unhinged when protesters show up to condemn Henry Kissinger. See for yourself:

…click on the above link to view video…

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations

December 29, 2014

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | The Clash of Civilizations.

Lots of quotes this week, particularly from my two favorite war criminals – Sam Huntington and Henry Kissinger. Everyone has heard of Kissinger, fewer of Huntington, who may have been even more of a hawk and law-and-order fetishist than Kissinger but never sufficiently escaped the ivory towers of Harvard to make a difference in Washington. Like me, Kissinger bolted academia at his first real opportunity for a better gig and never looked back, which is probably why I always found him to be so personally engaging and fun to be around. Sam Huntington … not so much.

But Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” argument is not just provocative, curmudgeonly, and hawkish. It is, I think, demonstrably more useful in making sense of the world than any competing theory, which is the highest praise any academic work can receive. Supplement Huntington’s work with a healthy dose of Kissinger’s writings on “the character of nations” and you’ve got a cogent and predictive intellectual framework for understanding the Big Picture of international politics. It’s a lens for seeing the world differently – a lens constructed from history and, yes, game theory – and that’s what makes this a foundational topic for Epsilon Theory.

Huntington and Kissinger were both realists (in the Thucydides and Bismarck sense of the word), as opposed to liberals (in the John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson sense of the word), which basically just means that they saw human political history as essentially cyclical and the human experience as essentially constant. Life is fundamentally “nasty, brutish, and short”, to quote Thomas Hobbes, and people band together in tribes, societies, and nation-states to do something about that. As such, we are constantly competing with other tribes, societies, and nation-states, and the patterns of that competition – patterns with names like “balance of power” and “empire” and “hegemony” – never really change across the centuries or from one continent to another. Sure, technology might provide some “progress” in creature comforts and quality of life (thank goodness for modern dentistry!), but basically technology just provides mechanisms for these political patterns to occur faster and with more devastating effect than before.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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